I got burned by this today, so I thought I would share it with you all. I had a perfectly good and working pluggable navigation that loaded a remote portlet in the left navigation pane. The only problem was that I had hardcoded the portlet ID and I wanted to make it configurable. So naturally I put the portlet ID and some other settings in a varpack, which is a reasonable thing to do. I then called my varpack from the constructor of my pluggable navigation class that implements IView.
Then I spent the next hour banging my head against the keyboard.
I kept getting a nasty Invocation Target Exception coming out of the reflection methods used to pre-load pluggable navigations. Eventually, using the handy space=MemoryDebug trick, I was able to ascertain that my varpack XML syntax was wrong and my varpack was looking empty to ALUI. So I fixed that and still, I got an ITE.
Then I looked at a PTSpy log and I discovered that the loading order of objects in ALUI was to blame. The portal loads built-in varpacks first, then it loads pluggable navigations, then it loads custom varpacks. So you can't use the varpack from the IView constructor. I moved it to the Display method and everything started working again. Phew. :-|
So, shame on me for trying to use a custom varpack before it was loaded. Make sure not to make the same mistake!